The Cassette
by NeoVenus22
Summary: A tape shows up in Niki's mailbox, and it's the last puzzle piece of her night in Vegas. Spoilers for 1x05. [complete]


Disclaimer: no one mentioned belongs to me.

Spoilers: 1x04, 'Hiros'

Dedication: to Sarafu, whose continual encouragement is the only thing keeping me from throwing my keyboard through my monitor.

* * *

The video tape shows up in her mailbox the next day. She tears open the paper, and even though there's no return address, she sets the packaging on fire in her sink. The cassette sits naked on her kitchen counter for an hour and a half, until she realizes she'll have to pick Micah up from school soon, and then she might never get a chance to see.

She doesn't know if she wants to see, but she needs to know.

She sits on the couch, pulls her knees to her chest, and drapes a blanket over herself, though she's already wearing a sweater. She feels naked and exposed, just like the unlabeled black cassette, and it makes her shiver.

She remembers buying that underwear. It used to be she had a whole drawer stuffed with skimpy undergarments. Then she got pregnant, and couldn't fit. Then she got dumped, and didn't care. Then she got poor, and couldn't afford dignity any more than she could afford food better than ramen and frozen waffles.

She wore her usual old underwear when she started the site. Drab things, in beige and white and pink, that she bought in bulk at Kmart. Micah started school, and the site started getting hits, and suddenly she remembered what it was like to feel sexy. And if she concentrated on that, and the money, then she could almost ignore the rest of it. She bought the black ensemble with her the first cash earned from her web business. Now she's watching as it hits the floor of a stranger's hotel room.

She looks happy, the woman in the video. Gyrating and naked and breathless, but happy. Niki knows enough about herself to know she's not faking. If that even is herself. She wants to say that it isn't, but she keeps waking up in compromising situations with no memories, and to be honest, she doesn't know what to think anymore.

Come to think of it, the politician doesn't look particularly unhappy himself. He's groaning — and groping — and he's not faking it, either.

It's medical, she thinks, it must be. Epilepsy or schizophrenia, or some combination of the two. There has to be an explanation, something scribbled in the footnotes of an obscure medical journal that explains why she has video evidence of herself doing something she doesn't remember doing.

She doesn't remember the blanket falling low on Nathan Petrelli's hips, she doesn't remember the furrow in his brow, or the low hiss of his voice as he whispers something to her the camera can't catch.

The camera, she thinks, is both blessing and curse. She at last has documentation of the Other (that other presence, the dark twinkle to her reflection that she knows she's not imagining). But this is also documentation of her crossing the line. Of losing control, whatever little she had, to the Other. It's documentation of her casting aside what little moral ground she had left.

Niki pauses the video, as the politician rolls onto his back. His chest is raised in a deep, gasping breath, and her mouth is open in a giggle. Niki doesn't recollect any of this, so she takes stock of what she does.

She remembers sweet wine, sliding down her throat, warming her stomach, fuzzing the edges of her brain. Loosening her lips, making her say ridiculous things. She was playing for his sympathy as a cheap ploy, but she hadn't meant to go quite so far.

She remembers love in his eyes. Not for Niki. Their encounter consisted largely of cool leers and calculating smiles as he assessed the situation, but when it came to the subject of his wife, he was not smooth politician enough to hide his affection for her.

She remembers the former counteracting with the latter, the wine in her head telling her to stay, with the expression in his face screaming that she needed to leave before regret hit hard. And she had.

She remembers leaving.

Niki remembers resolution: the hallway to the elevator; the cool draft of the opening doors on a face heated with alcohol and embarrassment; the Muzak trying futilely to soothe her.

She remembers nothing after that, but she knows the memory is real.

This is real, too. This video. She knows now the Other is real, and not a figment of her tired imagination. Because that is not her. The thought scares her more than anything else this tape implicates.

She has no need to see any more. She fast-forwards the cassette, watches the blur of the bodies as they come together and apart, again and again and again. With every passing second on the blinking green indicator, the bile rises in her throat, and the knot in her stomach unties. She's caught in a weird in-between place, halfway between disgust and desire. She recalls the before and the after, but not the during, and this is the part of which she needs to reassure herself.

Nathan tucks strands of loose hair behind the video woman's ear, and on the couch, Niki's eyes well involuntarily. She's embarrassed to be emotional, but she doesn't know the last time she was the victim of tenderness. She keeps moving the video forward, and it cuts off shortly after the on-screen characters fall asleep. The tape has been edited.

The VCR kicks into automatic rewind, leaving Niki alone with a whirring sound and a black screen. And images, hundreds of them, burned into her brain. He called her "good." She doesn't know what that means anymore. When she was younger, it meant being a good wife and a good mother. The marriage thing was now out of the equation, of course, but she was doing her best at the parenting thing.

This video is her "doing her best." Maybe she was only good by Petrelli's standards, maybe she was only good in comparison to him.

After that night, Niki doesn't think she has any faith in the human race anymore. Everyone is out for themselves, for money or pleasure. She's just following the same script.

In the TV, she sees her reflection, muted and dulled by the darkness of the screen. She sees herself sprawled on the couch, remote in hand, with tired eyes and a limp figure.

Then the reflection smiles and sits up.

Niki screams, and hurls the remote at the television. It clatters off with a useless thunk, skitters on the wood floor and disappears under the cabinet. Her reflection only smiles wider, her alert position mirroring Niki's own, but with far more sinister intent in her black eyes. Niki's chest is heaving with panic, and fueled by something primal, she grabs a book off the table (it's Micah's, the history book he left behind this morning), and hurls it with inhuman strength at the television.

The screen shatters, and the ghostly image is gone, but Niki can't still her anxious breaths.

She's moving in slow motion, through molasses, as she collects the ejected cassette from the VCR and the book from amid the glass shards on the floor. The book she replaces on the coffee table, but the cassette she keeps. She holds it close to her chest, protecting what's on it. She owns the cassette. She controls this small rectangle, controls the black plastic and shiny tape. She doesn't control the events portrayed on the tape, but she squeezes the cassette more tightly, trying to squeeze away the images of the Other. Possession of the cassette is the only control she has anymore.

She cannot destroy every reflective surface, she thinks desperately, stepping gingerly through the remains of the TV. She cannot win.


End file.
